February 9, 2026
Higgs found, drama unleashed
Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard?
No new particles, big bills, and bigger hot takes — is physics napping or on life support
TLDR: After the Higgs, the collider hasn’t turned up new particles, sparking Quanta’s “dead or just hard?” pulse check. Commenters split between patience and funding angst, roast AI-as-answer, and meme it as Schrödinger’s science—maybe dead, maybe alive—making the slowdown and money trail the real plot twist.
Quanta’s latest check-in asks if particle physics is dead or just really hard after the LHC found the Higgs boson in 2012 and then… crickets. And the comments? Absolutely on fire. One camp says calm down: as jahnu puts it, progress isn’t a conveyor belt — it could take hundreds of years and that’s normal. The other camp is rolling its eyes at the new vibe of “wait for AI to solve it,” with tehjoker calling that mindset a thought-terminating shrug: “maybe AI will just give me the answer.”
Funding drama bubbles up fast. ktallett argues researchers must dress their dreams for donors: particle physics just isn’t what “people with the cash” want right now — AI and quantum computing are the it-girls. Meanwhile, bananaflag drops the history bomb: 150 years ago, theory looked done but data broke it; today we know our theories are incomplete, but we’ve got no experiments breaking them. Translation: brilliant minds, starving for clues. And then davidw lands the meme: it’s “impossible to tell without opening the box,” turning the whole field into a Schrödinger’s-cat punchline. Verdict from the crowd: not dead, not thriving — stuck in a very expensive cliffhanger, with patience, panic, and punchlines fighting for the mic.
Key Points
- •The LHC discovered the Higgs boson in 2012, completing the Standard Model’s set of 25 known particles.
- •The Standard Model does not account for dark matter, matter–antimatter asymmetry, or the origin of the Big Bang.
- •The hierarchy problem highlights the large disparity between the Higgs mass scale and the Planck scale tied to quantum gravity.
- •Edward Witten proposed in 1981 that additional particles slightly heavier than the Higgs could resolve the hierarchy problem.
- •Despite expectations, LHC collisions have revealed no particles or forces beyond the Standard Model, prompting a crisis in particle physics.